895571

research-article2019
SLR0010.1177/0267658319895571Second Language ResearchSorace

second
language
Special Issue: Commentary to a Keynote research

Second Language Research

L1 attrition in a wider
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DOI: 10.1177/0267658319895571
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Antonella Sorace
University of Edinburgh, UK

In proposing a formal model for grammatical attrition, Hick and Dominguez (2019,
henceforth H&D) present some valid arguments but also expose some limitations of their
approach. First, they state that ‘the possibility of grammatical attrition is crucial to our
understanding of bilingual acquisition.’ I am in complete agreement with this view. For
a long time, research on first language (L1) attrition was not systematically connected to
research on second language (L2) acquisition. The emergent view now is rather to look
at L1 attrition and L2 acquisition as two inseparable sides of bilingualism, both in the
same individual speaker and in bilingual communities. Second, the new picture requires
considering L1 attrition not only in terms of loss or erosion but, more generally, as
change (although not necessarily grammatical change): this is a view that has been gain-
ing strength in recent years, and is also explicitly recognized by H&D. Third, H&D
acknowledge that incorporating L1 attrition in a generative model requires ‘a model of
the language faculty that retains a role for input in maintaining an L1 grammar beyond
the primary years of language acquisition’: they are absolutely right, although they
ignore the equally strong need to understand how language interacts with general cogni-
tion and how these interactions modulate both L1 attrition and L2 acquisition. Ultimately,
H&D’s main concern seems to be to provide a formal generative account of L1 attrition,
to the exclusion of additional (not necessarily alternative) explanations. I will briefly
expand on each of these points.
I would start by distinguishing between L1 attrition in first-generation L1 speakers
who learn another language as adults and generational attrition in heritage speakers who
learn their minority language as children in a bilingual context. H&D are only concerned
with individual attrition, not with generational attrition, but the distinction is important
because the effects on language in first vs. second generation attrition are different, both
in terms of scope and in terms of stability. As H&D recognize, individual attrition
involves no ‘erosion’ or ‘permanent loss’ but rather fluctuations and increasing

Corresponding author:
Antonella Sorace, University of Edinburgh, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, UK.
Email: a.sorace@ed.ac.uk
2 Second Language Research 00(0)

optionality: this is because attrition in this sense crucially does not affect the grammar
itself but rather how the grammar is accessed (Sorace, 2011, 2016). Parental input
affected by attrition is then transmitted to the next generation of heritage speakers, who
regularize variable input as part of their grammar. The degree of parental attrition has
generally not been studied as a variable in heritage language development, but it is cru-
cial for an understanding of the diachronic dimension of language change.
Therefore, the answer to H&D’s question of ‘where grammatical attrition arises, what
kind of mental representations are affected?’ is that in fact mental representations of
grammatical knowledge in mature L1 speakers are not affected. Supporting evidence
comes from studies of re-immersion in the L1 community (Chamorro, Sturt and Sorace,
2016), which shows that attrition effects are not permanent but at least partly reversible.
Sensitivity to re-exposure/re-immersion is incompatible with permanent changes: one
more reason to think that the mental grammar itself is not affected by another language
that becomes dominant in the environment.
H&D also ask: ‘what accounts for the strikingly low levels of attrition in L1 gram-
mar?’ A potential answer to this question comes from evidence that attrition is both selec-
tive and partly independent of the specific languages involved. Research on pronominal
reference, which H&D quote extensively, shows that grammatical properties interfacing
with non-linguistic external conditions are particularly sensitive to attrition, both when
the L2 is typologically similar to the L1 and when it is typologically different (see, for
example, Bini, 1993; Bonfieni, 2018; Lozano, 2006). One plausible hypothesis is that
what is affected by attrition, at least in adult late bilinguals, are the non-linguistic pro-
cesses involved in connecting pronominal choices with ever-changing discourse, prag-
matic, and contextual conditions. The frequency of implementing the connections
between choices of grammatical forms and contextual conditions is a factor modulating
attrition, which explains the sensitivity of these effects to re-immersion in the L1 com-
munity. H&D prefer to locate ‘interpretive dependencies’ within the grammar itself and
treat attrition as involving (re)assigning L2 feature bundles to L1 lexical items; however,
it is unclear not only how this treatment can accommodate the existing evidence but also
what it can gain in terms of parsimony: why should we try to account for everything in
formal grammatical terms when there are plausible non-grammatical explanations?
It is interesting that H&D revive the input–intake distinction that used to be common
in early work on L2 acquisition (e.g. Corder, 1982). ‘Intake’ is the proportion of the input
that can be processed by the learner for acquisition. One of the factors modulating how
much ‘input’ becomes ‘intake’ is the extent to which L2 learners rely on their L1. There
is individual variation among L2 learners in the degree to which they are able to inhibit
their L1 when learning and then using the L2. Successful inhibition of the L1 may play
a role both in making it more susceptible to attrition and in developing L2 knowledge;
conversely, less successful inhibition of the L1 leads to L2 development that continues to
be filtered through the L1. As H&D put it, ‘changes in the L1 grammar require successful
[L2] intake’: in other words, successful L2 acquisition builds on the possibility that the
L1 also (selectively) changes, which may be influenced by individual differences in cog-
nitive profiles among learners. This is an alternative way of accounting for the ‘attrition
via acquisition’ relationship that H&D propose: the relationship certainly exists but it is
Sorace 3

based on complex interactions of language and general cognition that go beyond a purely
grammatical account. Extralinguistic factors are mentioned as part of the ‘inference
component’ in H&D’s model, whose job in attrition is to update the L1 grammar: essen-
tially, to modify it in the light of dominant L2 input, ‘supplanting’ L1 feature assemblies
with the corresponding L2 ones. However, it is unclear how exactly these factors work.
Furthermore, this kind of permanent change due to specific L1–L2 correspondences is
not what we see in L1 attrition of mature grammars.
Finally, it would be hard to dispute the need for ‘a model of the language faculty that
retains a role for input in maintaining an L1 grammar beyond the primary years of lan-
guage acquisition’. Generative linguistic models are traditionally based on monolingual
acquisition and implicitly assume that acquiring a native language leads to an unmodifi-
able steady state. But now that bilingualism is becoming more common even in the so-
called Anglosphere, we need a formal model of language that recognizes that bilinguals
are not the sum of two monolinguals, as Grosjean (1989) famously put it. Is it true that
‘there is currently no model of grammatical attrition compatible with formal generative
models’? It depends on whether the ideal model has to encompass different aspects of
acquisition and attrition, such as knowledge representations and real-time processing.
The Interface Hypothesis is cited as a generative model that fails to account for attrition
in grammatical representations. However, H&D seem to consider an old version of the
interface model, based on a binary split between ‘narrow syntax’ and ‘interfaces’. In the
light of current research (see Chamorro and Sorace, 2019; Sorace, 2011, 2016), it seems
more appropriate to assume a continuum of conditions on syntactic realization, ranging
from more ‘internal’ to more ‘external’ and involving different types of cognitive pro-
cesses: there is no syntax that is unaffected by conditions of any kind. At this stage, there
is still much that we do not know about the relative sensitivity of different conditions to
changes in the environment. What we do know is that grammatical structures subject to
more ‘external’ conditions tend to be more susceptible to the effects of reduced exposure
to the L1 and increased exposure to another language, at least in adults (on the difference
between anaphora resolution and DOM in L1 Spanish attrition, see, for example,
Chamorro, Sorace and Sturt, 2016; Chamorro, Sturt and Sorace, 2016). Conversely,
grammatical structures conditioned by more ‘internal’ conditions are resistant to attri-
tion, at least in adult speakers (much less in children; see Flores, 2010).
In sum, we are working on a better understanding of the relationship between L1 attri-
tion and adult L2 acquisition. H&D raise some interesting questions but we need a wider
interdisciplinary framework to address them effectively.

Declaration of Conflicting Interest

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
4 Second Language Research 00(0)

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